Have you ever visited an eCommerce website, saw a product that your friend, family member or coworker would totally enjoy? I am sure the majority of online shoppers have had such an experience, which is why many online merchants have a “send this product to a friend� feature. I can’t speak for every shopping carts solution, but I do have previous experience with osCommerce and I can tell you that although it does comes with a “tell a friend� feature, it’s virtually impossible to customize the email message or the look of the box with out an additional module. In fact, the only part a webmaster is able control is its visibility, which can be enabled or disabled.

WebCart makes it easier for webmasters to customize the look and text of the “send to a friend� dialog box. The process is fairly simple. Once an eCommerce store owner decides to utilize this feature, they would simply log on to the backend of their shopping cart system. Then, Select the marketing icon > Tell a friend config > this will bring up a screen which allows webmasters to edit and apply options to the “tell a friend� dialog box.  Here is where the magic takes place. With a few strokes of the keyboard users are able to create a new custom message which will be the default once a user selects it. Furthermore, the “tell a friend� config page has another very important option which allows the customer who is sending the product to include a personal custom message.

Overall, the “tell a friend� addition might not be seen as a huge deal. However, it’s vital for WebCart to exceed the criteria for shopping cart software, and every feature becomes important when a level of criteria is set.

Emailing is a strong component of the eCommerce world because it’s the communication tool of choice for consumers and business’ alike. Therefore, I personally believe that every shopping cart solution should have a robust and fully functional email system, which can work together with customers and vendors with out using an external program. Since the criteria for shopping cart software is important to the developers of WebCart we set out to create a distinguished emailing feature to put in WebCart 11.

To explain how the WebCart email system can help a business I decided to write up an example, in order illustrate a real world situation. Sara LaCie runs a small online used book store. Most of Sara’s clients pay her with credit cards; however, a small few don’t have access to a credit card, and therefore place orders online with the promise of mailing a check or money order. Obviously Sara doesn’t mail her book out until the check is received and cleared, but she does take the book off her website, and categorizes it as sold. Often times, customers forget to mail a check which creates problems for Sara because now she is holding on to inventory that she could potentially sell to someone else. With her previous shopping cart solution, Sara would have to manually locate all orders which have not been paid, copy and paste their email address in to outlook, and send out a customized email requesting a check.

WebCart can save Sara a great deal of time and effort with its new email system. Within WebCart 11, Sarah would simply press the email icon then select “outstanding emails” which would bring up a page where she can enter a custom request for payment with personalization options. All Sarah has to do is run a report on all outstanding invoices, select the appropriate email template, click send and boom! She is done.

Recently, Google made a available a host of online tools to aid webmasters in getting recognized on the most popular search engine. All of Google’s online webmaster tools can be found at http://www.google.com/webmaster In this post I will go over briefly, some of the great ways an online business can meet there criteria with a shopping cart solutions, by using the free webmaster tools.

Google Sitemaps

This is perhaps the most useful feature which Google offers webmasters. Basically, Google is saying please let me know what pages are on your website so we can index them. A shopping cart with hundreds of products can now be submitted to Google with relative ease. I personally use http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ to generate my sitemap. Once the sitemap is generated I uploaded the XML file to the main directory of my website. The XML page usually includes links to all my online products, which will help google recognize all my product pages. Obviously, this is not a sure way to get a top ten ranking, but it’s the first step in letting Google know where and what your products are all about.

The webmaster toolbox also includes a simple analysis of orphaned links (broken links) which Google spiders, as well as a wealth of information about your site. By following and fixing errors that Google finds, your site can be on its way to eCommerce success.